Presenting the Eshell | Hacker News Reader

Presenting the Eshell

howardism.org

98 pointssigna1110 comments

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825607

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8649856

Eshell has a lot of potential, but it needs a bit more polish and documentation. It's sort of an unfinished part of Emacs.

People often take it for a terminal emulator, which is not, and get frustrated when typical ncurses applications don't run properly.

Yep. My Emacs workflow is a lot like my old terminal workflow, but now it's Emacs+packages instead of terminal+ncurses apps. If you try to do a lot of terminal emulation inside Emacs you'll probably have a bad time.

I try to use eshell for whatever I can (some things still work better in a standard terminal), so I wrote Equake, a drop-down console (with tabs) in Emacs Lisp for eshell (though it can also open term or shell tabs as well):

https://gitlab.com/emacsomancer/equake (link include animated gifs of Equake in action)

Can someone comment on how to get better colors on eshell?

The only thing that stops me from using it is that xterm-256color and ansi-color and all the articles on the web talking about colors ultimately say this - the terminal emulator that it ships with just cannot do better colors?

(Eg when you do a ‘cargo run’ for rust, the error colors aren’t even highlighted in eshell)

https://github.com/atomontage/xterm-color

That looked like the way to do it but I haven't tried yet.

I tried and it mostly works, but for rustc/cargo in particular you also have to set the $TERM environment variable to "xterm" [1].

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/45728#issuecomment-...

Interestingly, I've gotten used to checking $TERM and making sure it's set due to entering Docker containers to poke around them: in a lot of images, it's unset, and you get really old-school terminal emulator behaviour without it!

A minor addition to what the article says about ipython: You can run arbitrary shell commands there without system() by prefixing them with !. It even supports using python variables as in `a = "some_dir"; ! cd $a`.

this looks cool!

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